The menu is heavy on seeds and sprouting things. But don’t let that put you
off, for Crussh is that rare thing – healthy and delicious.

Ah, health, you elusive mistress: one minute you reside in an egg-white omelette, the next you're in a hunk of beef with spinach, à la Anna Wintour. And then we arrived here, where dietary verities and common sense meet: where if you want to be healthy you quite literally have to eat a lot of salad. God, I miss the 1990s.

The principle of Crussh, a London-based chain of juice bars, is to jam large amounts of vegetables into fibrous wraps or plastic punnets, pulverise more fruit than I would normally eat in a week into one drink, and serve it in an atmosphere that is incredibly orange, like the future.

I went to the one near the Houses of Parliament. I love sitting amid young strategists and the bit players of BBC News. It makes me feel I'm in The West Wing. I was famished, which I'd normally avoid on the basis it gives the restaurant an unfair advantage; here I took my hunger as a useful counterbalance to my extreme prejudice against sprouting beans.

CC had a quinoa and black-barley salad (£4.05), a salmon sushi box (£5.50) and a Mango Madness smoothie (£2.95), into which I slipped a Fat Burner booster shot, for 50p (not because she's fat, just to see if she could taste it). You can't taste the boosters, it transpires. But nor could you check whether they worked, because it would be impossible to tell whether to attribute your weight loss to the greens, beans, smoothies, boosters or just the zingy milieu.

The Mango Madness was stunning – enough banana to make it smooth, but not so much it tasted of banana, probiotic yogurt to make it solid, but 98 per cent fat-free, so it didn't taste like a pudding (those Innocent ones always taste like fool to me, thin fool).

The quinoa salad was really superior (and it knew it, boasting of how super it was all over the box). Had quinoa been the sole carb, I'd have found it a bit fiddly, but the black barley added heft and pleasing chewiness, while the assorted seeds underlined a subtle nuttiness. There was feta. There was raw spinach. The lemon dressing was deep and intense. Do you want to know how many calories it had? 210! You'd practically use that just digesting it, and thinking of an intelligent way to ask a special adviser to pass you a napkin.

The sushi was good; the layer of fish was about half as thick as normal, probably to keep the calorie count down, but it looked a bit stingy. CC said she didn't mind, because a chunk of raw fish the size of a thumb would make her want to gag. I said, described like that, it would make anybody want to gag.

There were rice noodles and seaweed underneath, which were my favourite bit of the whole meal; I adore that slippery, slightly dank texture. A rice wine and soy dressing was lovely.

I had a Blueberry Hill smoothie (£2.95), which was very drinkable, not too sweet, with a nice emulsive finish. Blueberries don't bring much to the table, flavour-wise, but they're a nice colour, so I'll let them live.

My O-Me-Good salad (£4.20) had so many ingredients it fuddled my mind; by the end I was unable to think of any foods that weren't in it. The mackerel was wonderful, subtly smoked, very soft but not fuzzy. There was pearl barley, there were heaps of classy lettuces, there were goji berries and flax-seeds, which I could see but not taste, and there was an egg. A horseradish dressing was nice but self-effacing.

Then CC had a slice of carrot cake (£2 – light, cinnamony crumb, very good whipped cream-cheese icing) and I had a slice of chocolate cake (£2 – proper, squidgy party cake). So it is possible to mess it all up for yourself in here. But you have to really be trying. My better self loves it in here.

FIT FOOD...

The 8th Day 111 Oxford Road, Manchester (0161 273 4878)

This veggie café and health-food shop, run by a workers' co-operative, serves soups, salads and stews – all of them wholesome and many vegan-friendly. Try the chilled borscht (£2.90) before spicy dahl with brown rice (£5.95)

The Nectar 16 Onley Street, Norwich (07913 758088)

Raw-food fans should seek out this tiny café where colourful salads are piled high with grated vegetables and sprouting grains (£4.95). There are homemade flax-seed crackers to dip into pesto and hummus (£4.95), and raw-chocolate cakes for dessert, too (£2.50)

Goji 36 Goodramgate, York (01904 622614)

Colourful, cosy and hung with paintings by local artists, this place serves delicious vegetable pâtés and lentil bakes. The 'vegan fish and chips', which features tofu wrapped in nori seaweed and coated in a quinoa and parsley crumb, is a must (£10.95)